Abu Talib was born in 1752. His father was a Turk from Isfahan who fled to India and later from India to Bengal. He died in Murshidabad in 1768, and left young Abu Talib to care for his family. Abu…
Abu Talib was born in 1752. His father was a Turk from Isfahan who fled to India and later from India to Bengal. He died in Murshidabad in 1768, and left young Abu Talib to care for his family. Abu…
Since I read Said’s Orientalism many years ago, I’ve been wondering why we don’t have a parallel branch of “knowledge” labeled Occidentalism. Well, it actually seems pretty obvious why: Orientalism is a colonial discourse produced as part of Western expansion…
From Refashioning Iran, pp. 33-34: The challenge of postcolonial historiography is to re-historicize the processes that have been concealed and ossified by the Eurocentric accounts of modernity. This challenge also involves uncovering the underside of “occidental rationality.” Such a project…
From Refashioning Iran, p 33: The obliteration of the intellectual contributions of Persianate scholars to the formation of Orientalism coincided with the late eighteenth-century emergence of authorship as a principle of textual attribution and creditation in Europe. The increases significance…
From Refashioning Iran, p20: The modular histories of Orientalism grounded exclusively in a European context the intellectual contributions of Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805), Sir William Jones (1746-94), and other “pioneering” Orientalists. This historiographical selection played a strategic role in constituting “the West”…
From Refashioning Iran, p 18: The formation of Orientalism as an area of European academic inquiry was grounded on a “genesis amnesia” that systematically obliterated the dialogic conditions of its emergence and the production of its linguistic and textual tools.…
From Refashioning Iran, p 8: Recounting the contentions for scientific rationality, historians of modern Iran often select scholars who endorsed astrology and opposed heliocentrism as Muslim representatives,ignoring those who did not fit into this schema. By claiming that the Persian…